Sustainability of Recycling Perovskite Solar Cells: Economic and Environmental Perspectives

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are among the most promising next-generation photovoltaic technologies due to their high efficiency and low production costs. Nonetheless, concerns about the toxicity of lead-based absorbers and the lack of standardized recycling protocols present substantial environmental and economic challenges. This thesis provides a comparative life-cycle environmental and economic evaluation of eight state-of-the-art PSC recycling processes. This assessment adheres to ISO 14040/44 standards and combines environmental and cost analyses. Solvent reuse is explicitly modeled for recovery of each functional layer (back contact, absorber, hole-transport, and TCO/glass) to reflect industrial practices. The results show that while most methods reduce environmental impact in specific layers, only those with high solvent reuse rates and minimal reliance on electricity for separation processes achieve consistent reductions in impact across all layers. When solvent usage is optimized for delamination, five of the eight processes reduce total normalized impacts by 35-72% compared with primary extraction, whereas three routes remain marginally higher (≤10%). Economically, pathways reliant on inexpensive reagents and capable of recovering high-value components, such as indium-tin-oxide (ITO) / glass, silver, or Spiro-OMeTAD, exhibit the most attractive revenue-to-cost ratios. One of the processes, belonging to the acidic/Aqueous precipitation group, stands out as the most balanced, with costs below $ 3/m² in a single processing cycle. Overall, the study demonstrates that recycling schemes integrating chemical selectivity, solvent circularity, and multi-layer recovery can transform PSC end-of-life management from an environmental liability into a technically and economically viable circular pathway.